Event Report: Protecting Women, Improving Policy – Confronting Alcohol’s Role in Gendered Violence
On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Movendi International convened a global virtual event highlighting one of the most neglected drivers of violence against women: alcohol. Bringing together experts from WHO Europe, civil society leaders from Uganda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and participants from around the world, the timely discussions examined how alcohol increases the frequency and severity of gendered violence, how alcohol industry practices reinforce harmful gender norms and fuel violence, and why evidence-based alcohol policy is essential for protecting women’s health and rights. The event generated powerful insights, lived-experience testimonies, and clear policy directions for governments seeking to eliminate violence against women and girls.
Event Background
Violence against women and girls remains one of the world’s most pervasive human rights violations. The World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 3 women globally experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. The WHO Regional Office for Europe has launched the Special Initiative on Violence Against Women and Girls (SIVAWG) to accelerate multisectoral, evidence-based action across 53 Member States of the European region to prevent, respond to, and ultimately eliminate violence against women and girls.
Across all regions, alcohol is a major – yet consistently underestimated and under-addressed – driver of gender-based violence. Women and girls with lived experience of gender-based violence know what scientific evidence clearly documents: there is a robust, repeated link: alcohol increases the risk, frequency, and severity of intimate partner violence (IPV), domestic violence, sexual violence, and violence against children. Alcohol does not cause gender-based violence – but it makes violence more likely, more severe, and more dangerous, and it intersects with harmful gender norms fueled by decades of alcohol marketing objectifying and sexualising women and girls, patriarchal inequality, and commercial determinants of health.
At the same time, alcohol harm to women is rising due to increasing alcohol use among women and intense, targeted marketing to women and girls by alcohol companies that links alcohol with female empowerment, independence, and coping for mental health strains. Women in low- and middle-income countries carry a disproportionate burden of alcohol-fuelled violence, economic harm, and other second hand effects from men’s alcohol consumption.
Yet alcohol policy remains a neglected tool in violence against women prevention initiative, despite clear evidence that reducing alcohol availability, affordability, and marketing is among the most impactful ways to prevent violence against women.
The gap between lived experience, evidence, and action is significant.
This event brings together global expertise, local experience, and community voices to make the case for integrating alcohol policy into gender-based violence prevention – as part of a comprehensive approach to promoting women’s health and rights.
Event Highlights and Key Insights
The event was grounded in a clear recognition that violence against women and girls is one of the world’s most pervasive human rights violations – and that alcohol remains a major, yet consistently underestimated and under-addressed, driver of this harm.
Despite robust global evidence showing that alcohol increases the likelihood, frequency, and severity of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and violence against children, alcohol policy remains largely absent from national and regional strategies to eliminate violence against women. This gap persists even as women face rising direct health harms from targeted alcohol marketing and the persistent second-hand harms caused by men’s alcohol use.
Against this backdrop, the event brought together speakers and experiences to examine the structural links between alcohol industry practices, alcohol harms, harmful gender norms, and violence – and to highlight concrete, rights-based policy solutions that governments can adopt now.
1. Alcohol Industry Practices Fuel Harmful Gender Norms and Violence
Kristina Šperková, International President of Movendi International, opened the event by establishing alcohol and alcohol industry practices as a structural driver of violence against women. She traced a century of alcohol industry marketing that sexualises, objectifies, and dehumanises women, reinforcing harmful gender norms and patriarchic power structures of men’s dominance over women. She showed how these commercial practices intersect with patriarchal inequality and toxic masculinities, making violence more likely, more severe, and more dangerous.
Kristina also highlighted the rapid rise of alcohol harm among women in markets where alcohol companies aggressively target women, creating a double burden: increasing direct health harms for women and persistent second hand harms caused by men’s alcohol use. Her presentation made clear that alcohol policy is not peripheral but central to violence prevention, and that key WHO violence-prevention strategies benefit from improved alcohol policy – including women’s economic empowerment, childhood violence prevention, and transforming harmful social norms.
2. Socially Engaged Theatre Exposes the Human Impact of Alcohol-Fueled Violence
Adis Arnautović, Executive Director of the Center for Youth Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, brought the audience into lived realities through the Hidden Shadows socially engaged theatre initiative. Based on real stories of women and children affected by domestic violence, the production confronts the cultural normalisation of alcohol-fueled harm and encourages communities to break the silence around violence.
Over a decade, the initiative has reached thousands directly and more than 200,000 people through media, and it has become an institutional tool used in police training across the Western Balkans. Adis illustrated how creative methodologies such as theatre can encourage conversations about harmful norms, increase understanding among frontline sectors, and build bridges between communities and institutions in responding to alcohol-related domestic violence.
3. Cheap and Ubiquitous Alcohol Deepens Women’s Inequality in Uganda
Juliet Namukasa, Chairperson of the Uganda Alcohol Policy Alliance, brought the lived realities of alcohol-driven gender-based violence into focus, showing how widespread alcohol harm intersects with economic hardship, gender inequality, and deeply rooted social norms. She demonstrated how the wide availability and extremely low cost of alcohol create conditions where heavy use becomes normalised and violence against women escalates.
Juliet described how women, often responsible for family survival without real authority or safety, face a heavy economic and emotional burden: they are abused when protecting scarce household resources, discouraged from seeking legal help due to poverty, and culturally expected to endure violence for their children’s sake.
Her message underlined Kristina’s point that alcohol profoundly undermines women’s economic and social empowerment. Juliet also presented community-led solutions – from awareness-raising and faith-leader engagement to grassroots campaigns and local bylaws – demonstrating how accelerating alcohol policy is essential for strengthening women’s rights, autonomy, and safety.
4. WHO Europe: Health Systems Must Lead on Multisectoral Violence Prevention
Melanie Hyde, technical officer for gender equality, health equity and human rights at WHO Europe, presented the Special Initiative on Violence Against Women and Girls (SIVAWG), underscoring violence as both a human rights violation and a major public health crisis.
She emphasised that health systems are often the first point of professional contact for survivors and play a pivotal role in early identification, referral, and survivor-centred care. Melanie highlighted the need for sustainable investment, capacity-building of health workers, and stronger health leadership in multisectoral policy responses.
She also stressed that alcohol is a modifiable risk factor that intersects with every dimension of women’s health and rights – making alcohol policy an important, and currently under-recognised, element of effective violence prevention strategies across the region.
5. A Unified Message: Alcohol Policy Is Essential Violence Prevention
The concluding discussion brought together insights from all speakers: that alcohol is a structural driver of violence against women; that commercial practices and harmful gender norms reinforce this harm; and that meaningful prevention requires integrating alcohol policy into national violence against women and girls strategies.
In closing, Kristina emphasised the potential of alcohol policy becoming recognised as a core component of violence prevention, gender equality, and women’s health and rights.
Summary of Kristina Šperková’s Main Points
Kristina Šperková is the International President of Movendi International. Kristina made three main points in her scene-setting presentation:
1. A century of alcohol industry marketing has normalised the dehumanisation of women, fuelling harmful gender norms that underpin men’s power over women and contribute to gendered violence.
Kristina highlighted how alcohol advertising – over many decades and across countries – has repeatedly depicted women in sexualised, dehumanised, and objectified ways to sell alcohol to men. This entrenched portrayal has shaped and continues to shape perception and norms of male power over women, reinforces patriarchal norms, and contributes to the social acceptance of misogyny and violence.
In addition, the alcohol industry is increasingly deploying marketing targeting women and girls to convert them to alcohol consumers. Also that alcohol marketing perpetuates harmful gender norms, while seeking to exploit feminism and narratives of female liberation and empowerment: fruit-forward whiskies, “wellness” branding, and low-calorie liquor, “empowerment” co-option all build on a long history of commodifying women and the cause of gender equality.
2. Women face a double burden: rising harm from men’s alcohol use and rapidly increasing harm from their own consumption in markets the industry has deliberately cultivated.
Kristina showed that wherever alcohol companies target women as “new growth markets,” women’s health harms escalate quickly: rising liver disease, deteriorating mental health, rising addiction rates, breast cancer, cardiovascular conditions, and increasing mortality due to alcohol – such as the doubling of alcohol-related deaths among women in the United States.
Meanwhile, women continue to face the social and economic harms caused by men’s alcohol use, including violence, financial strain, caregiving burdens, and reduced autonomy.
This growing dual burden is the direct result of commercial expansion strategies that exploit women’s rights and well-being and perpetuate harmful gender norms.
3. Alcohol policy is an essential – yet underused – violence-prevention tool, and human rights frameworks such as CEDAW provide powerful levers for action that governments must employ.
Kristina showed the five most high-impact actions that the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends to prevent and reduce violence against women and girls. WHO recommends measures to address:
- Social norms around gender and violence,
- Women’s economic and social empowerment,
- Childhood exposure to violence,
- Alcohol use, and
- Legal and justice system interventions.
While WHO acknowledges the impact of reducing alcohol affordability, availability, and marketing, Kristina also highlighted that the other key interventions also benefit from alcohol policy, such women’s economic and social empowerment – a point that Juliet Namukasa underlined later on in the event; or childhood exposure to violence – a point that came out from the presentation of Adis Arnautovic; and social norms around gender and violence – that alcohol marketing perpetuates.
Kristina added the importance of curbing alcohol industry interference in policy making such as:
- conflict of interest protection,
- lobbying transparency register,
- excluding alcohol industry from violence against women and girls policy processes, and
- restricting alcohol industry Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives in women’s rights spaces.
She emphasised that CEDAW obliges states to address factors that heighten women’s risk of violence, including harmful alcohol environments and predatory alcohol marketing. Integrating alcohol policy into national violence prevention strategies is therefore both evidence-based and a human rights duty.
Summary of Adis Arnautović’s Key Points (Center for Youth Education, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Adis Arnautović is the Executive Director of the Center for Youth Education (CEM) in Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Using Socially Engaged Theatre to Confront Alcohol-Related Domestic Violence
Adis Arnautović presented Hidden Shadows, a socially engaged theatre initiative launched in 2013 by the Center for Youth Education (CEM) to confront alcohol-related domestic violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Developed from real stories of women and children affected by violence, the play exposes how alcohol escalates conflict, normalizes aggression in communities, and deepens women’s and young people’s vulnerability. Through public performances and facilitated discussions, the project challenges the social acceptance of alcohol-fueled harm.
A Decade of Impact Across the Region
Over more than ten years, Hidden Shadows has become a significant awareness-raising tool across the Western Balkans. The campaign has attracted over 5,000 visitors, generated more than 100 media articles, and reached at least 200,000 people with information about alcohol harm and violence. It has also earned recognition from international donors, including the Swedish Institute, UN Women, the U.S. Embassy, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the world’s largest regional security organisation.
Building Institutional Cooperation and Shifting Professional Norms
A defining achievement of the initiative is its integration into professional training structures. The project has catalyzed cooperation between police, courts, prosecutors, social services, mental health institutions, and ministries of education. The Ministry of Internal Affairs now uses the play in training processes for police officers, and the OSCE Mission in Vienna has incorporated Hidden Shadows into its regional police training programs, demonstrating its value in shifting institutional understanding of alcohol-related violence.
Theatre as a Powerful Tool for Awareness and Prevention
Adis emphasized that theater creates a transformative space for communities and institutions to confront the realities of alcohol-related domestic violence, reflect on harmful norms, and motivate social change. He encouraged partners in other countries to consider similar art-based methodologies as part of comprehensive violence-prevention strategies.
Summary of Juliet Namukasa’s Key Points (Uganda Alcohol Policy Alliance)
Juliet Namukasa is the chairperson of the Uganda Alcohol Policy Alliance. She made four key messages.
A Community-Level Perspective on Alcohol-Driven Gender-Based Violence
Juliet provided a grounded, community-level perspective from Uganda, where alcohol-related gender-based violence is widespread and deeply intertwined with economic hardship, gender inequality, and harmful social norms. She showed that alcohol is widely available and extremely cheap, regardless of alcohol strength, creating an environment where heavy use is normalised and violence becomes more frequent and more severe.
Poverty, Power Inequality, and the Burden on Women
High poverty levels further trap women in abusive situations: even when violence occurs, many women do not seek legal redress because they fear carrying the family’s economic burden alone. Women are often abused as they try to protect scarce household resources that men divert to alcohol, and many women shoulder full responsibility for family survival without having real authority or safety. Cultural expectations reinforce this burden, with women expected to endure for the sake of their children.
Alcohol Harm Undermines Women’s Economic and Social Empowerment
Juliet’s presentation underscored Kristina’s earlier point that women’s economic and social empowerment is directly undermined by alcohol harm, and that alcohol policy is critical to improving women’s autonomy, empowerment, liberation, financial security, and safety. She highlighted that structural and economic conditions in Uganda mean that reducing alcohol availability, affordability, and marketing is not only a public health measure but also an essential investment in women’s rights, livelihoods, and long-term wellbeing.
Community-Led Mitigation and Grassroots Action
Juliet also outlined community-led mitigative activities already underway: raising awareness for both men and women to de-normalise alcohol use; engaging moral duty bearers such as faith leaders, to support healthy, positive coping strategies in cases of trauma; diversifying livelihoods to reduce reliance on illicit alcohol production; leading grassroots alcohol-prevention campaigns; and promoting local bylaws to implement common-sense limits on alcohol availability at the community level.
Alcohol Policy and Women’s Empowerment Go Hand in Hand
These locally driven solutions illustrate how accelerating alcohol policy and empowering women economically and socially are mutually reinforcing priorities – central to reducing violence and protecting women and girls in Uganda.
Summary of Melanie Hyde’s Main Points (WHO Europe, SIVAWG)
Melanie Hyde is the technical officer for gender equality, health equity and human rights at the WHO Regional Office for Europe.
WHO Europe’s Leadership on Strengthening Health-Sector Response
Melanie introduced WHO Europe’s Special Initiative on Violence Against Women and Girls (SIVAWG), outlining its goal of strengthening health-sector leadership in preventing and responding to violence across the European Region. She emphasized three core objectives:
- boosting sustainable investment in effective prevention and response systems,
- ensuring the health sector plays a central role in multisectoral national strategies, and
- building the capacity of health workers and policymakers to identify, support, and advocate for women affected by violence.
The Special Initiative on Violence Against Women and Girls (SIVAWG) positions violence against women as both a human rights violation and a major public health crisis, making it one of WHO Europe’s top priorities for 2025–2030. The initiative strengthens health-sector leadership by advancing research, evidence, guidelines, capacity-building, advocacy, and multisectoral partnerships to equip health systems to better prevent and respond to violence.
With 26% of women in the European Region experiencing intimate partner or sexual violence, WHO underscores that health-care providers – often the first point of contact for survivors – play a critical role in delivering life-saving, trauma-informed care and linking women and girls to essential services.
Health Impacts and the Opportunity for Integrating Alcohol Policy
She underscored the severe and wide-ranging health impacts experienced by women exposed to intimate partner violence – physical, mental, reproductive, and chronic health consequences – reinforcing the need for early identification and integrated, survivor-centred support.
Finally, Melanie highlighted the strong opportunity for aligning violence prevention strategies with alcohol policy measures, given alcohol’s clear and modifiable role in increasing the risk, frequency, and severity of violence against women.
For more detailed information see the info box below.
Alcohol Policy Is Violence Prevention – And a Human Rights Obligation
The event concluded with a clear and unified message: preventing violence against women requires addressing the structural factors that fuel it, including the commercial systems that normalise and profit from alcohol use.
Evidence from global research, community realities, WHO leadership, and creative advocacy approaches all point in the same direction: reducing alcohol affordability, availability, and marketing is among the most impactful and underutilised strategies to protect women’s health, safety, and rights.
Speakers also underscored that these measures can only succeed if governments curb alcohol industry interference in policymaking – through conflict of interest protections, lobbying transparency registers, exclusion of industry from violance against women and girls policy processes, and restrictions on corporate social responsibility initiatives in women’s rights spaces, as demonstrated by leading practice in Australia.
Integrating alcohol policy into national and regional violence-prevention frameworks is not only evidence-based — it is required under human rights commitments, including CEDAW. Governments have both the tools and the responsibility to act.
Key Resources Highlighted During the Event
To deepen the evidence base and support action, the event featured several cornerstone resources that illuminate the links between alcohol, gender inequality, and violence against women. These information boxes summarise the latest global findings, regional initiatives, and Movendi International’s own flagship analyses that together provide a comprehensive foundation for policy change.
Each resource illustrates the event’s central message: addressing alcohol harm is essential to advancing women’s health, rights, and safety.
INFO BOX: WHO Europe’s Special Initiative on Violence Against Women and Girls (SIVAWG)
The Special Initiative on Violence Against Women and Girls (SIVAWG) is a regional call to action for Member States to strengthen health sector leadership in preventing and responding to violence against women and girls. Recognizing gendered violence as both a human rights violation and a public health crisis, WHO Europe has made violence against women and girls one of its top priorities for 2025–2030.
The new initiative is at the core of the second European Programme of Work 2026–2030. It commits WHO Europe to assisting countries in making sure their health systems are better equipped to protect women and girls from gender-based violence by focusing on:
- research and evidence: to document the magnitude of violence, its risk factors and consequences, and identify effective interventions for prevention and response;
- dissemination of guidelines and tools: to set norms and standards for an effective health response to violence against women and girls;
- capacity-building: to equip health-care providers to strengthen health systems in prevention and response; and
- advocacy and partnerships:
- to strengthen leadership in health systems and build political will to address the issue head on;
- to increase sustainable investment in effective health sector violence prevention and response strategies to eliminate violence against women and girls;
- to increase the role of the health sector in multisectoral policies designed to prevent and respond to gender-based violence.
WHO Europe also released a new report: “Care, courage, change: health-sector leadership in tackling violence against women and girls“
The report aims to assess how well health systems across the WHO European Region are responding to violence against women and girls, identify critical policy and service gaps, and call for urgent strengthening of survivor-centred, rights-based health-sector leadership aligned with WHO standards.
WHO underscores that health care providers are often the first point of professional contact for survivors and play a critical role in delivering life-saving care and linking women and girls to multi-sectoral services.
In the WHO European Region, 26% of women aged 15 – 49 have experienced intimate partner and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. The health impacts are profound, long-lasting, and prevent women and girls from reaching their full potential. SIVAWG aims to ensure that health systems across the region are equipped, accountable, and empowered to respond.
INFO BOX: Movendi International Flagship Analysis
“Alcohol and Gendered Violence: Integrating Alcohol Policy Into Strategies to Eliminate Violence Against Women and Promote Women’s Rights”
This flagship analysis synthesises world-class scientific evidence, lived experiences from multiple regions, commercial determinants research, and human-rights law to demonstrate that alcohol is a major yet persistently overlooked driver of violence against women. Alcohol increases the likelihood, frequency, severity, and lethality of violence; fuels coercive control; and causes significant second-hand harm to women and children, especially through men’s alcohol use.
The report shows that alcohol industry practices intensify these harms, including a century-long track record of portraying women as sexualised, objectified, and dehumanised; aggressively targeting women as “new markets”; embedding alcohol in wellness and empowerment narratives; and systematically interfering in policymaking. These practices reinforce toxic gender norms and constitute a commercial determinant of violence against women.
Drawing on CEDAW and WHO guidance, the analysis identifies evidence-based alcohol policy measures—such as taxation, availability regulation, and comprehensive marketing restrictions—as essential and underutilised violence-prevention tools. It concludes that integrating alcohol policy into national and regional strategies to eliminate violence against women is both a public-health necessity and a human-rights obligation, and calls on governments to adopt structural solutions that protect women’s health, rights, and safety.
INFO BOX: New Landmark Report on Women and Alcohol Harm
A 2025 landmark report, The Changing Landscape of Women and Alcohol Harm, exposes a rapidly escalating but widely overlooked global crisis: women are experiencing rising and disproportionate harm from the products and practices of the alcohol industry. The report shows that alcohol use among women and girls has increased at unprecedented rates worldwide, driven by targeted marketing, shifting social norms, and structural inequalities.
Behind the industry’s narratives of liberation and empowerment lies a stark reality: women face higher biological vulnerability, faster progression to addiction, rising cancer and liver disease rates, and disproportionate second-hand harms from men’s alcohol use. The report also documents how alcohol fuels gender-based violence and undermines women’s economic and social empowerment. It calls for urgent, ambitious action to implement evidence-based alcohol policies as core tools for advancing women’s health, human rights, and gender equality.
Key Findings
- Alcohol use among women is rising globally, with harm increasing faster among women than men.
- Alcohol is not gender-neutral: women experience higher risks of cancers, liver disease, cardiovascular harm, mental health disorders, and alcohol use disorder at lower levels of consumption.
- The alcohol industry deliberately targets women through feminized marketing, empowerment messaging, digital ads, and social media influencers.
- Alcohol fuels intimate partner violence, sexual violence, economic abuse, and mental health harm.
- Women and girls in low- and middle-income countries bear the heaviest burden due to compounding vulnerabilities.
Why It Matters
The report positions alcohol harm as a women’s rights, public health, and social justice priority. It highlights that alcohol policies are essential enablers for:
- Preventing and reducing gender-based violence,
- Improving women’s health and economic security,
- Replacing harmful social norms, and
- Protecting girls from alcohol industry exploitation.
Solutions That Work
Backed by WHO and robust scientific evidence, the report outlines high-impact public policy solutions:
- Raising alcohol taxes to reduce population-level alcohol consumption and fund women’s health and rights programs,
- Introducing common sense limits on alcohol availability to prevent and reduce violence and economic harm,
- Banning alcohol advertising and promotion to women, including digital advertising and sponsorship,
- Embedding alcohol policy within CEDAW and SDG implementation, and
- Investing in community-led interventions, especially in LMICs.
This report is a wake-up call for governments, women’s rights advocates, and global health leaders: addressing alcohol harm is integral to achieving gender equality and protecting women and girls worldwide.